A travel consumer can conventionally enjoy the benefits of a diversity of choices: a marketplace that is replete with purchase options; numerous information sources that provide travel-related information and advice on everything from destinations to hotels and related points-of-interest; and finally, a reasonable degree of price transparency on a vast array of travel-related goods and services. While consumers derive much utility from this choice environment—enabled by online travel agencies (OTAs) and travel websites—the fact remains that the travel consumer is often encumbered by information abundance and by legacy technology platforms that almost invariably complicate the consumer's choice. For an average consumer, these choice-related challenges take many forms, such as a plurality of travel-related goals and objectives pertaining to all of the relevant facets and phases of the travel planning process; the existence of a large number of viable itinerary options to sort through, evaluate, and ultimately choose from; the existence of disparate and non-homogenous information sources, all of which possess varying degrees of quality, usefulness, and reliability; and the need to consider complex value trade-offs among key choice attributes and objectives (e.g., price vs. suitability of a selected flight for the consumer), together with the existence of often conflicting objectives (e.g., a desire for luxury, constrained by willingness-to-pay).
Empirical studies reveal that travelers are more likely to rely on advice and recommendations of friends, relatives, colleagues, and so forth than other information sources. Conventionally, the traveler can review the recommendations of friends by intentionally searching for them, for example, on a social network page of a friend or on a profile page of the friend on a travel website. However, the conventional OTAs do not take the recommendations of friends of the traveler into consideration when searching and presenting feasible travel itineraries to the traveler.